Visio Corporation
American software company

Visio Corporation was a software company based in Seattle, Washington, best known for creating the Visio diagramming application. Founded in 1989 by alumni of Aldus Corporation, the company released its first product in 1992 and went public in 1995. On 7 January 2000, Microsoft acquired Visio Corporation in a stock swap valued at approximately US$1.5 billion, at the time Microsoft's largest acquisition. The product continues under the name Microsoft Visio.
History
Axon Corporation was incorporated on 1 May 1989, shortly after Jeremy Jaech left Aldus Corporation. In summer 1990, Jaech and Ted Johnson developed the initial product concept, then recruited Dave Walter as the third co-founder. All three founders had worked at Aldus: Jaech and Walter were among Aldus's original founders, and Johnson had been the lead developer of Aldus PageMaker for Windows.
In 1992, before releasing any product, the company changed its name to Shapeware. It released its first application, Visio, in November of that year. Visio 4.0, released on 18 August 1995, was one of the first applications built specifically for Windows 95.
“Visio Corporation” enters the record as american software company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Visio, Corporation and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Visio Corporation” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Visio, Corporation and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7936108. VIAF identifies the subject as 144551987. The Library of Congress control number is no96026709. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1989, 1992, 1995 and 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Visio Corporation” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.